It’s a sad little fact that a lot of the folks at the TeachStreet office are given parking tickets from time to time since the Seattle Police Station is a couple blocks away from our office. I’ve already gotten several tickets, all defintiely attributed to my forgetfulness.  I’d like to think I’m learning from my mistakes, and I’m hoping that translates into some savings in my pocket.  Here are some things that I learned along the way.

HOW TO AVOID PARKING TICKETS:

1. Take up walking as a new form of transportation
   We were given feet for a reason, so go out and use them.  If you have time, or if you’re close to your destination  just walk over rather than taking the gas guzzling car –  which definitely helps our environment. Knock two birds with one stone by ChiWalking (5Focus) to work.
2. Take up biking/cycling as a new form of transportation
   I’ve seen more and more bicyclist each morning while I drive to work, and it’s definitely a growing community both in Seattle and Portland.  There are so many resources out there to help you get started. I’d suggest you take a look at these bike maintenance or bicycling classes to help you get an idea.
3. Learn to navigate through the city and take the bus
   Both Seattle and Portland have great mass transit option with Metro Transit and TriMet.  I suggest taking advantage of these options, and it’ll help you better navigate through the city. And a recomendation from our CTO Fred, if you’re in Seattle check out BusMonster.com for your bus route needs. If you need a bit more help with navigation skills, there are some navigation classes out there too.
4. Work on your time management skills
   More likely than not, the reason one gets a ticket is because they forgot about it, which is in my case, a lot of the times. I suggest you either set an alarm on your cell phone or an old fashioned sticky note. If you’re in Seattle, take the “Time Management from Inside Out” by Seattle Free School — its free!
5. Prepare your negotiating or debating skills
   When you do get the parking ticket, you still have a chance to get out of it. You can appeal the ticket and battle it out in court, so remember to take pictures of your car and brush up on your debating or negotiating skills.

It’s definitely a work in progress for me.  Hopefully this was helpful, please comment below if you have any questions or suggestion.

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by Chris Lewis who teaches Seattle Tennis Lessons

The other day one of my students, Allison, asked me what my favorite tennis book was. I found it surprisingly difficult to pick just one. Even now, two days later, I’m still having trouble picking a single book.

So Allison, I’m sorry. I know I’m a day late and and dollar short, but here’s my cop out answer: a list of my five favorite tennis books.

• Hard Courts by John Feinstein

• Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis by Brad Gilbert

• The Bud Collins History of Tennis: An Authoritative Encyclopedia and Record Book by Bud Collins

• Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life by James Blake

• Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe

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You’re stranded on a desert island. It’s just you. There’s no Gilligan. No Skipper. And Mary Ann is out to lunch. What would your picks be?

Photo: Cook Islands Beach | benedict.adam

For me, my one movie would be “The Shawshank Redemption,” my one book would be “The God of Small Things” and my one CD would be Journey’s greatest hits. We all have guilty indulgences, right?

The other day, we posed a similar question to members of TeachStreet. If you were stranded in your Seattle neighborhood and you could only take one class, what class would you take?

Well, the ballots are in and the hanging chads have been counted. Alphabetically by subject, here are the top “Desert Island Classes” for 10 Seattle area neighborhoods.

• Boot Camp Class (Magnolia Life)
• Cooking Class (Downtown)
• Flamenco Dancing (West Seattle)
• Home Buying (Queen Anne)
• Hot Yoga (Laurelhurst)
• Kids Modeling Class (Eastlake)
• Knitting Class (Madison Park)
• Music Lessons (Fremont)
• Stained Glass (Wallingford)
• Swing Dancing (Capitol Hill)
• Tennis Lessons (Ballard)

What about Portlanders? What’s your desert island class?

Also, for those Seattle-ites who’re in TeachStreet’s neighborhood (we’re just off Westlake and Denny), check out the South Lake Union Community website. You can even add a link to your favorite website: TeachStreet!

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Recess4GrownUps

Let your brain out to play.

Hips Don’t Lie

Why We Love Slinky Dance Moves

Whether it’s a shimmy, a swivel, a sway or a sashay, movement from the hips gets attention. Bilingual beauty Shakira really said it all; hips don’t lie. Everybody knows there’s something sensual about a swiveling pelvis - just ask all the Elvis fans! - but recent science has emerged that explains the why of it.

So just what is it that makes swaying hips so sexy? Well, a research team at the University of West Scotland did some homework, and what they discovered is perhaps more intimate than most of us would have predicted. In women, at least, the results of the study suggested that a lot about a woman’s sexuality (specifically, how easy it is for her to reach climax) can be determined just by observing the way she walks. The more swivel a subject had in her hips when walking, the more likely she was to…well, you know.

Picture: Creative Commons |Woman

Greater stride length and vertebral rotation (fancy ways of saying, the more visible motion in the pelvis - motions that are generally considered “sexy”) were observed in women who reported the greatest physical pleasure from intimate activities, according to the researchers. Observers in the study were 80% accurate (based on the women’s self-reported sexual histories and preferences) at gauging what a woman liked in the bedroom just from watching how she walked. Granted, the observers were trained sexologists, but the results are surprising nonetheless. Like I said, everyone knows there’s something sexual about pelvic motion, whether the swivel is on Elvis, Shakira or in a cheerleading routine. But apparently there’s more to the motion than just eye candy - really, the motions of belly dancing, tango or samba say a lot about the muscle tone and flexibility in your core abdomen and pelvis!

Researchers also suggested that increased stride length and vertebral rotation were correlated with overall core strength, balance and confidence. So activities that increase strength and flexibility in the core not only contribute to better posture, firmer abs and general sex appeal…but they might have other benefits, too, if you know what I mean.

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It was great to meet more teachers out there in Greater Seattle and help them with their profiles and using TeachStreet in general. Harold, Scott, and I all went to the local Cupcake Royale in Ballard for TeachStreet 101, where teacher learned the following:

1. Learn more about TeachStreet.com
2. Learn more about the new tools we have (ie. Craigslist Tool)
3. Get hands on help to boost up your profile

We hope to hold another meet up for people who need help with their profiles, and would love to get your feedback.  If you could just comment below and let us know the best time and day for an event like this, it would be great! (ie. Morning, Tuesday-Thursday). Where will TeachStreet 101 land next?

Here are a few pictures from the meet up today:

Here’s that nifty “TeachStreet 101” sign I promised

Harold showing Delilah how to get more students for her belly dancing classes!

Scott explaining a little bit about the “Request Review” process

Here are a couple of the teachers that came by:

BreakThrough Parent Institute (parenting classes)

Delilah Flynn (belly dancing lessons)

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Going green has been all the rave the last couple years. Huge corporations are moving to greener office environments, families are turning last nights dinner into tomorrows compost, it seems like everyone is going green.  Feeling blue that you are left out of the green? Fear not TeachStreet is here to educate.

Image by meaduva

• Skip the meat:
  Try going vegetarian one day a week. If you factor in the energy to raise the cattle and transport the meat It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef.  That is 40 times more water than is used to produce 1 pound of potatoes. Check out  Vegetarian Chinese Cooking or Sunny Vegetarian Soiree for some tasty vegetarian recipes.

• Don’t let it run:
  When brushing your teeth, washing your face, or shaving don’t let the water run. You can save 150 gallons of water month or 1,800 gallons a year!

• Grow it yourself:
  Why not start your own garden? Starting a garden only costs a couple packets of seeds and some garden tools. Not only will you be saving money and having he freshest veggies you’ll be cutting down a trip to the grocery store and the packaging material that comes with your fruits and vegetables.

Want to learn more? Check out Create “Green” Home Products,  Beginner’s Guide to Organic Composting, or  Organic Gardening. If we make one or two small changes to our daily routine we can all become alittle more green.

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Hectic day today around the TeachStreet headquarters, with a morning board meeting, end-of-sprint de-bugging, and more. So, it was with with a huge relief/celebratory mood that we headed off for the Seattle P-I’s BigBlog Meetup at Motore Coffee. It was fun to finally meet the BigBlog’s Monica Guzman in person and learn a little bit more about local blogging. And, our host (DJ… sitting in the lower left in these photos) was awesome!

DJ brought out some yummy Laughing Buddha (Joseph was beside himself with delicousness…), and we all enjoyed some rabid discussions around Debate-gate, Palin-tology and more.

Early in the night, resident Programmable Web founder John Musser and daughter Emily got in on the action with some Vespa-action — see, aren’t you sorry you missed the meetup?

If you’d like to follow some of these folks on twitter:
BigBlog - www.twitter.com/bigblog
Monica Guzman - www.twitter.com/moniguzman
Motore Coffee - www.twitter.com/motore
Dave Schappell (me) - www.twitter.com/daveschappell

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I’ve been meaning to get this blog post up for about 3 months — OK, really more like 6 months! Seattle Swing HepCat dance founder Chris Chapman has been a longtime friend of TeachStreet, and maybe even more important, he suffered through several weeks of private lindy hop classes with my wife and I, in our home! We received the classes as a gift from a friend, and while I admit that it probably isn’t something I would have signed up for on my own, I have to also admit that it was awesome!

In less than 20 minutes, he had my wife and I dancing in our dining room, and by the end of the third classes we were lindy hopping, swing dancing, and just having a blast! In addition, we got in a workout (really, we were exhausted by the end of each 50 minute session) and were able to escape from daily stresses for a bit.

The good news for you is that you can learn to swing dance as well… and the time is now — Chris has a new 5-week class starting next Tuesday, September 30 at 7:15pm, on Capitol Hill — click here to get full details for the learning to swing dance class. Who knows? You may even get to shake your thing with a guy named Dave Schappell

Here’s a quick video of Chris and his students dancing, and talking about dancing — obviously, they’re having a fantastic time:

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Recess4GrownUps

Let your brain out to play.

Waltzing to Your Own Tune

The History of a Famous Dance

How positively obscene! There ought to be a law. It’s a threat to common decency! Can you imagine, doing a thing like that with a man in public?

…OK, get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about one of the most famous, and popular, ballroom dance styles in the world today; the waltz. Today, the waltz is considered a refined and romantic activity; doing the waltz is unlikely to provoke chaperone intervention at a high school dance. In fact, the waltz is, in the modern world, more likely to be associated with high society or the older generation, than with hormonally charged youngsters “getting jiggy with it”. But this has not always been the case.

“Waltz” comes from the German word walzen, meaning to glide, roll or turn. The dance is performed in 3/4 time, in two-person pairs of (traditionally) one man and one woman.

The waltz first emerged in a suburb of Vienna, Austria - it was immediately popular, evolving quickly from its origin in Austrian peasant dances, or wellers, into the more familiar style we know today involving a close hold between partners. By the seventeenth century, waltzes were being performed in the court of the Hapsburgs; by the eighteenth century, it had spread to high society in other nations, such as France. Though popular among recreational dancers, the waltz was met with furious opposition from religious leaders, professional dancers, traditionalists, and moralists. The close physical proximity of the dancers, the rapid turns of the dance, and the unconventional three-quarter timing of the dance angered many people of the day. England, ever the bastion of conservative social mores, was one of the last European nations to embrace (pardon the pun) the waltz. As late as 1866, articles published in Britain denounced the waltz as a “horror”, a “wicked dance”, and an activity of “violent embraces and canterings”.

Picture: Creative Commons | Waltzing

As so often in history, violent opposition did nothing to diminish the popularity of the dance, and in fact the controversy provoked even greater interest in the waltz. Despite its place today as an activity of elegance and panache, the waltz is actually the historical equivalent of modern breakdancing, freak dancing, or pole dancing; hardly a pasttime approved of by the establishment…though much enjoyed by merrymakers the world over! Scandalous.

53. That’s how many daily metrics we report on at TeachStreet. Ridiculous as this is, it’s not as uncommon as you might think. With Google Analytics and other free, readily available tools, the easy thing to do is to collect clickstream data. The much harder thing, especially for non e-commerce sites, is to define the 2-4 metrics that really matter, the ones that define why your business exists.

Define Key Metrics for Your Business

There’s no such thing as a divine metric. Sorry, but there just isn’t. It’s your job to define why your website exists: e-mail subscriptions, product sales, lead gen, content consumption, software downloads, etc. If your site is about content consumption, the waters can get murky, but no matter what you do, define these goals before you dive into a single weblog or traffic report.

Talk Like a Pirate A.A.R.R.R

As yesterday was international “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” I thought there was no better time than the present to share a framework to help you define your business’s objectives: Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates. You should watch the video, but essentially the acronym A.A.R.R.R is a way of defining customer life cycles.

• A - Acquisition: Person visits your site.
• A - Activation: Person performs desired action (sign up, sale, download, etc.).
• R - Retention: Repeat business… person comes back.
• R - Referral: They do your marketing for you… they tell other people.
• R - Revenue: You make money.

Though the first and the last letters of the acronym are important, really focus your energies on the middle three: activation, retention, and referral. Define what this means for your business, measure them and test like crazy to optimize them!

Web Analytics Blogs

And just as your list of key metrics should be short, so too is the number of blogs you need to read to get your feet wet. Admittedly, my feed reader gets unruly at times, but these are three I would highly recommend.

• Web Analytics Demystified - Eric Peterson
• Occam’s Razor - Avinash Kaushik
• Epik One - Justin Cutroni

Some classes to check out

Also, if you’re in Seattle and you’re looking for a small business marketing class, a class on how to build a website, or want to learn from some of the best graphic designers in Seattle, both Robbin Block and the School of Visual Concepts have a number of classes worth checking out, too!

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